LFS1

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LFS1 is an installation originating from the two artists’ ongoing research into dynamic architectures composed of solid and ephemeral media. Innovative and antiquated technologies meet in a forest of light and sound emitting nodes. Sculptural light beams orchestrate the emergent pulsing and waving field.

Both a control signal and an aesthetic element, the scanning light projections exemplify the artists’ treatment of media as building blocks for ephemeral, immersive architectures. Herein the territories of digital and analog media, solid matter and sensory experience fade into each other.

The light planes scanning the space act as conductors of the atmospheric composition. When probed by a light beam the signal synthesized by a node slightly alters or makes it go silent. The choreography of scanning beams thus causes the spatial field of light and sound to morph and contrasts the warm neon glow with washes of cold LED light. Navigating this misty landscape, the visitor becomes the spectator of an ever-changing environment filled with organic signals and patterns.

In each of the 40 pole-mounted nodes a transparent piezo-electric sound sheet cylinder envelopes two stacked Nixie neon tubes. An embedded signal generator drives both of them so that the waveforms emanate from the modules as both sound and light. The signal excites the piezo sound sheet, causing audible air pressure waves. Synchronously the signal modulates the visible extension of the two Nixie tubes. One for the positive phase of the signal, the other for the negative. The Nixie neon plasma tube is an analog medium subjected to the complex laws of particle physics and electro-magnetism. It is an imprecise, unreliable and now disused 1950’s display technology that is applied and exploited here exactly for this specific, unstable character.